


Legacies

by mautadite



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1970s, Alternate Universe - Fashion & Models, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 17:38:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2118828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mautadite/pseuds/mautadite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>I will be king, and you will be my queen.</i>
</p>
<p>Arianne seeks out the queen across the Narrow Sea. [Modelling AU, 1970s-ish Westeros]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Legacies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Netgirl_y2k](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Netgirl_y2k/gifts).



> Written for round ten of the GOT Exchange. Prompt as seen in first part of summary.
> 
> I do mean 1970s- **ish**. Lightly inspired by _Gia_.

The Targaryen girl is even lovelier in person; no lies were told about that. 

One of the makeup artists shows Arianne up to the penthouse suite of the hotel, and she expects to find the object of her search spread out on a bed of silk sheets or fragrant flowers. She’s known for being striking, even in the most mundane of situations. The reality is not too far removed; Arianne is led into a sumptuous bathroom, where Daenerys lies soaking in a tub topped with rose petals, steam rising visibly from the water, her eyes blissfully closed.

_No_ , Arianne corrects herself, _Dany. Just Dany_. It was how she was christened when the first Essosi magazine had adorned its cover with her face, when she appeared in ads draped in Ibbenese furs, when she graced the runways in sheer Qartheen gowns. It is the name that is now being whispered in every agency and fashion house in Westeros. Dany. The queen across the Narrow Sea.

Arianne takes a seat on a softly cushioned chair that is set out for her, and eyes the girl as critically as she would one of her own models. There is almost nothing to criticise. When the makeup artist announces her presence, Dany opens blue eyes that are so rich and vibrant that they could be taken for indigo. Silver-blonde hair floats atop the bathwater like molten streams. Her lips are full, her face curved like a heart, her breasts small and round and high. Arianne searches for some flaw that might have been erased with technology, airbrushed into non-existence. They exist, in little sunburnt patches of skin, smatterings of freckles, a slightly crooked tooth revealed in her smiling. If anything, they only make her more beautiful.

She is being watched in return.

“You are not what I expected,” Dany says, sitting up straighter. She blows a kiss to the artist, who takes it as a dismissal and leaves. “When they told me someone from the Martell House would be coming to see me, I expected a stodgy old man.”

“I have heard that you’ve been in the habit of sending stodgy old men away within minutes,” Arianne replies easily. “My father is stodgier and graver than most, and my brother is little better. We decided that it would be best not to tempt fate.”

The laugh that springs forth is sweet and light, as of a young girl. And a girl she is at that, only nineteen years old. But she’s seen more and done more in this business than many of the ten year veterans that Arianne can name, and there is more than a bit of lead in that gaze.

“I trust that you don’t mind meeting in this way.” Dany waves a hand around the opulent bathroom and her state of undress.

“Not at all. Please, allow me to formally introduce myself. Arianne Martell.”

She stretches an arm across, and Dany extends a dripping hand to meet it. Her skin is hot to the touch, for all its dampness. They grip fingers lightly, and when Dany gives a gentle tug, Arianne leans forward to kiss the air on either side of her face. The girl is smiling when they pull back.

“The infamous Princess of Dorne. I’m charmed to meet you.”

“I’m sure the pleasure is all mine, Dany.”

Slim fingers reach for a cigarette case on a low stand beside the tub. Arianne takes out her own matchbook to set alight the thin cigarette that Dany places between her lips. Deep inhale, slow exhale towards the ceiling, and even in that there is a bit of the magic that flicks on every time a camera is trained upon her. A twofold elegance and animalism, cunning wrapped up in a queenly mien.

_We need her_ , Arianne’s father had said, and Arianne had disagreed, even as she’d pushed to be sent in place of Quentyn. _I_ want _her_ , she thinks now as she had thought then. Martell House has come far, and with Dany they can go further. Hers is a star that was meant to rise.

“Did you have a pleasant trip?” Dany asks.

“Very.” She travels with her cousins. Nymeria waits without the suite, Obara in the lobby downstairs. Better than any bodyguards she could ask for, both for their skill and because of the love she bears them. “Though it was quite long.”

Dany flicks the ashes over the side of the tub.

“Then I suppose you’d like to get right down to business.”

“That might be for the best.” Arianne can’t resist a little wink as she adjusts her sari across her shoulder. “Though I’m sure we’ll have more opportunities to speak after this, no?”

“Surely.” Her purple eyes glint. “However I wonder if I shouldn’t wait for my lawyers or advisors. I am just a young girl, and know little of such things—”

“Bullshit,” Arianne interjects smoothly, and it evokes such a paroxysm of laughter in the model that the water sloshes about in the tub. She has teeth that are awfully white in spite of her vice, and they all show in her merriment. Young she certainly is, but intelligent, and hardly an innocent.

“As you say,” Dany declares, grinning demurely but not without a shrewd edge to it. She taps her cigarette smartly. “Then we shall talk. Just talk. You obviously want what all the others want. My husband is hardly six months deceased, his company is through, and his partners are picking over the bones of it like so many crows. You want me to sign with you.”

Arianne inclines her head to show that Dany has the right of it. The events of Drogo’s death are still unclear, but the industry, ravenous as it is, isn’t interested in those points. The essential: the Khal is dead. Dothraki laws say that Dany cannot inherit, Dothraki customs decree that she should retire. Dany categorically refuses to do so, finding work independently instead. And now every agency in every land wants to snap her up, this living legend with so many years ahead of her, and so few friends among her husband’s people.

Not all of Drogo’s employees and friends have left her. Almost every face that Arianne had seen on this floor had been Dothraki, closer to her own complexion than Dany’s. Arianne had heard tell of a big bear of a man, some Westerosi agent who never left her side, but he is nowhere to be seen now.

“I rather think,” Arianne says, chin resting on her knuckles, “that after you see our terms, you’ll very much want to sign with us too, darling.”

Dany doesn’t seem impressed, though she keeps smiling faintly all the same.

“Aren’t you afraid that you might’ve made your trip for nothing? Like you already seem to know, I’ve sent quite a few agencies and their men away.”

“I am no man.”

The water shifts and sways as Dany peels a petal off of her breast. “That you aren’t,” Dany agrees.

“They can’t offer you what the Martell House can,” Arianne says confidently. “Your talent is wasted in Mereen. Right now, everyone in Westeros is whispering your name. Join with us, and within months, they’ll all be shouting it.”

Pale shoulders lift and dip in a dainty shrug. 

“I’ve had my eye on Westeros for a while now. I don’t know that I will need any help to break onto the scene there.” Dany takes a deep drag on her cigarette, holds it in for a second, and blows the smoke out in a wispy stream across the tub. For a moment, it resembles a cloud of steam. 

“I think that you’re wrong. Your family has formidable history on the continent, but you’ll need more than history to break the hold that the current families have there. Cersei Lannister might be a fading star, but she’ll burn bright going down.”

The Targaryens had indeed been the dragons of the industry in their day, never mind the corruption and the inbreeding and all the other rumours that floated around them. Old money, but most of that is gone now, lost in the ashes of her father's empire. Even older blood, and how it shows. Dany’s face turns haughty and almost regal at the mention of her lineage. 

“You don’t need to tell me of what my family used to be. I know the stories well; my brother had whole books of newspaper clippings dedicated to it. I could draw that dead Baratheon bastard’s face from memory. Trust me, Arianne Martell, I intend to take back what should be mine.”

Arianne inclines her head again, feeling a crest of excitement breaking like waves inside her chest. Her obvious competence, her overwhelming beauty, that fiery tone… It is all more than she dared hope for.

“And we want to help you take it.”

This time, Dany taps her ash into her bathwater, and doesn’t seem to notice or care.

“And why is that?”

Arianne chooses her words carefully. She is learning to be her father’s daughter in that.

“The Lannisters and Baratheons are loved, of course, but not by all. Accident or no, my aunt and my cousins died in that fire with your father, his partners and our models, just as your brother died in that car crash. So many bodies, so few arrests… well, like old alliances, it’s not something that’s easily forgotten.”

Least of all by Doran Martell, as Arianne had been pleasantly shocked to find out. Her father had nursed his plans long ago, given them suck on the burial grounds. There had even been plans to marry Arianne to Daenerys’ ill-fated brother, but it wasn’t meant to be. Now, Arianne thinks that the alternative might be even better.

Those lovely indigo eyes narrow and observe her carefully.

“You could do this without me,” Dany says eventually, going in another direction. “Your father’s agency is very successful, and you have a face and a figure that can make men weep from Casterly Rock to Qarth. I’m sure you have many girls signed with you who are almost as beautiful. You don’t need me to take King’s Landing by storm.”

Arianne agrees, essentially, but does not mention that her father insists otherwise. Nor does she mention what she thinks again, for the third time, watching this young girl with her sharp mind, her history written in her skin in strands as long as her silver-gold hair: need or not, she _wants_ her.

“Perhaps we could do it without you,” is what she says, “but doing it _with_ you would be all the sweeter. And the arrangement would be a mutually beneficial one, I assure you.”

Dany is silent for a while. She blows out a last puff of smoke towards the ceiling before stubbing out her cigarette in the nearest ashtray. She rises from the tub unselfconsciously, and reaches for a fluffy robe while the water sluice off of her. Her body is lithely curved, and quite short by modelling standards, but it is only another thing that makes her stand out so, capturing the eye.

She takes her time drying off, and Arianne cannot help but think again that she was infinitely more suited for this trip than poor, easily-flustered Quentyn was. When she is bundled up in her robe and seated with a towel draped around her neck, Dany turns to face Arianne.

“May I be frank with you, Arianne?”

“Please do,” she insists, leaning forward curiously.

Dany crosses her legs. Her hair is slicked back and her manner of sitting makes her chair look like a throne.

“I haven’t accepted any offers as yet because I haven’t gotten any serious ones. Not really. What I’ve had is a bunch of men who want to control me, use me up. You know what it’s like. This industry is run off the hard work of women, but they think of us as mules that they can run into the ground and throw away when they’re done.”

Her voice snaps like a crisp gale, all while she maintains her poise. Arianne nods, because she’s seen it happen to too many northern girls. Dany spreads her hands wide.

“I don’t intend to let that happen to me. I intend to _build_ something.”

She says the words as if she is etching them in stone, and Arianne feels her respect grow just a bit more.

“Frankness in exchange for frankness, then,” she says, leaning closer. “You’ll hear men from other places tell of Dorne, say that women are taking over here and seizing power there. It isn’t true.” 

“Oh?”

“Indeed. They mistake the merest bit of equilibrium for supremacy. Our laws are less strict and we may inherit before our younger brothers, but women have to fight for what they have, same as in any other country. And it’s what I intend to do until my father retires and I take over the agency, and every day after that until I die. Fight for what is mine. Just like you.”

Dany smiles, girlish to the last, but never losing that contemplative look in her eyes.

“I’m used to saying that there’s no one like me, but you might yet prove me wrong.”

It is a compliment, and Arianne accepts it with a smooth wink, holding back a laugh. The girl is very sure of herself; they had not lied about that either.

“Does that mean that you’ll take a look at the contract I have with me?” Arianne asks. “I’m sure that you’ll find that it offers you more than anyone else can.”

“I hope so. I’ve gotten very used to a few things these past several months, and control is very high on that list,” she says baldly. 

“Of course, darling.” She likes that Dany states her expectations plainly. “If we do this properly, we shall gain power together, not standing on each other’s backs. Our families were allied very successfully once before, and we can do it again.”

Dany drums her fingers on the stand, tilting her head to one side. A few tendrils of her hair slip free to curl around her face.

“Rhaegar and Elia come again,” she says, and just those words seem to evoke the golden age that had come before, and been crushed so suddenly. “I shall be king, and you shall be my queen, hm. Is that it? A mutual star rising?”

“That’s one way to put it,” Arianne laughs, pleased. 

That pensive look is back, but Arianne has seen the spark of interest and the curve of Dany’s smile, and her triumph blooms like a flower.

“Stay for dinner,” Dany says, getting to her feet. She holds out a hand that Arianne clasps immediately, and because all good unions begin and end this way, she gives it a kiss. Her lips leave a faint red stain on the pale skin. Dany laughs and kisses Arianne’s hand in reply. “We have much to discuss.”


End file.
